


To Solace

by pixiealtaira



Series: Kurtoberfest 2016 [9]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M, mentions of other Glee characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:07:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23765092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pixiealtaira/pseuds/pixiealtaira
Summary: Kurtoberfest prompt 13: graveyardPeace is found in odd places sometimes.
Relationships: Adam Crawford/Kurt Hummel
Series: Kurtoberfest 2016 [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1694098
Comments: 2
Kudos: 31





	To Solace

Kurt Hummel had never considered graveyards as someplace to be afraid of or even dislike. His mother had lived quite close to one when young, and she and her friends, after reading one of the Anne of Green Gables books (Kurt couldn’t’ remember which) and some other books by LM Montgomery, decided to turn it into a picnic and gather spot. They took care of graves and treated the whole area with respect, but they also played in it.

The Hummels didn’t live near a graveyard, so Kurt didn’t get to have picnics in one or spend enough time in one to know which graves never had visitors so didn’t know which to adopt. However, when his mom needed a walk and wander, to a graveyard they headed. Kurt’s mother treated graveyards like the world’s best scavenger hunt spot and the best place for history lessons around. Kurt had heard about the flu epidemic of 1918 before he ever went to school. He learned about the Civil War and WWI and WWII. He learned about trains and train crashes and wagon trains and pioneers.

As soon as he could identify things, on wild days when his mother needed to find him a place to run but didn’t want to have to spend the whole time at a park keeping the other kids from beating on him, she took him to the graveyard. She’d say “Kurt, find me a book.” And the hunt would begin. It was one of the ways he’d learned his ABCs (Kurt, find a name that starts with Z) and how he learned about dates...centuries and decades. He even learned how to figure out how long before Kurt’s years someone lived before he’d ever set foot into Kindergarten. When they’d been to the one closest to home too many times in a week, they sometimes went farther away to see others. Mostly they stuck to the one nearest home though.

One year, his mom was sick and they didn’t head to the graveyard at all. They didn’t head to the park. They didn’t head anywhere except to the hospital where Kurt would sit and wait with workbooks and reading books and puzzle books and coloring books, because there was no one who would watch him at home. Not after the lady who his dad hired to watch him left him at school instead of picking him up for a whole week and then the second lady he hired let her son beat Kurt up so badly his dad had to take him to the ER. Kurt missed the quiet at the graveyard. He missed the time with him mom.

When his mom died, for those first few years, his dad liked to go and sit by her grave. He’d talk. Kurt didn’t like interrupting him, or listening in. So Kurt explored. He found the graves of the Wilcox children, 6 babies who never made it past a month about a hundred years before. He learned from a visitor who knew the family that the mom had some sort of thing with her blood and that now-a-days the mom could have had a shot and her babies probably would have been fine. He met Cordelia Cumberland, whose mother got sick with the flu in 1918 and managed to hang on until she gave birth to Cordelia, then she died. Cordelia’s father raised her, two sisters and a brother. Then he joined the army and went to war and didn’t come home. He found the graves of the Michelson brothers, who died in hunting accidents…four brothers, four accidents, each roughly two years apart. Kurt found it odd that their sister died at about the same age they did, except she drowned in a pond according to the epitaph. He made himself scavenger hunts…Names starting with each letter, last names starting with each letter, traditional grave engravings, non-traditional engravings, symbols of where someone worked, their hobbies, religious affiliation, other affiliations.

It wasn’t the same as when he’d gone with his mom, but the graveyard was quiet and peaceful and no one stared when you bawled in a graveyard.

When the trips with his dad started to dwindle from once or twice a week to once or twice a month and then twice a year, Kurt made the most of his time at the graveyard. He read up on different traditions for gravestones and looked to find examples, anything that took him on long walks around the graveyard, like he had done with his mom. He talked to her while he walked. That was when he told her about life…about bullies, about being held back, about learning to cook and clean, about school, about being different.

The first place Kurt drove by himself after getting his drivers’ license was the graveyard. He sat by his mother’s grave and talked to her like his dad always did when they were there together. It didn’t feel right. Kurt got up and walked around, talking as he did. He told her about how high school was worse than anything before…the names, the pee balloons, dumpster tosses, shoved into locked, slushies, loneliness. He talked about hating high school and how he hoped by some chance the next year was better and about working at the garage for the summer.

Fall that year brought glee club and friends, for pretty much the first time ever. However not the type of friends who’d have his back all the time, or he could share his trips to the graveyard with. He tried once with Mercedes, asking if she wanted to go with him when he left flowers for his mother’s birthday, and she flipped out over that. Apparently in Mercedes family one did not visit graveyards after they had the funeral…at least she never had. It was creepy and possibly satanic.

Tina was convinced graveyards were haunted, and said she’d go if they could go at night and do EVPs or something like that. However they were very dull during the day and she’d rather go somewhere else she was going to hang out.

Brittany started to cry thinking about all the dead people. Santana threated to beat his face in.

He’d given up asking before he became close enough friends to anyone else. (Although he knew Finn thought that he’d be possessed if he ever went into one and Rachel was sure things lurked in graveyards that wanted to kill her.)

Until Blaine. He figured that Blaine was important enough to take to meet his mom. Blaine went, complaining all the way (this is depressing, Kurt, shouldn’t we be like doing something fun? Let’s go look at bowties at the Mall. It’s not like your mom knows you come and so she won’t miss it.), then complaining the whole time they were there (it is so sad here. And creepy. And, I don’t know, couldn’t you have like gotten her a bigger gravestone? It’s just kind of dull…this whole place isn’t very fancy, is it? It is very depressing though), and continued after they left (I don’t see why you go there, it is just so boring. Graveyards are just dull, so grey and dreary.).

Kurt knew Blaine didn’t see graveyards as a peaceful place like he did, or find them interesting. But he had hoped he’d go and just support Kurt, for Kurt’s sake. Therefore he wasn’t surprised Blaine hadn’t even originally been aware of Dalton’s graveyard. Kurt however found the graveyard on the grounds of Dalton fascinating. There were teachers and students and babies and staff. It had whole new sets of images to see and explore. He briefly found a fellow graveyard enthusiast in Thad, from the Warblers, who knew the history of each person buried. For weeks before Christmas and then during January, Thad and Kurt would spend one of their breaks between classes out in the graveyard while Kurt introduced Thad to graveyard scavenger hunts and Thad told Kurt all the stories. Blaine took issue with it and Kurt spent more time doing what Blaine asked to do and what Blaine found interesting. (Of course Blaine also did not find history to be interesting, most musicals to be interesting...especially not anything older or edgy, cars to be interesting, or even the Olympics to be interesting. Clothing only interested him when it was new and trendy, but only in the trendy trying not to look trendy manner. He wasn’t interested in backstage part of anything…not set design, not costumes, not make-up artistry, not script writing, and only in composing if it was for something ‘cool’.) Kurt simply got used to just talking about what Blaine liked and doing what Blaine liked and doing his own stuff on his own…usually late at night or when Blaine was ‘with the guys’, whether the guys were Warblers or the New Directions. It meant though that his graveyard excursions were usually just him again.

Even throughout his senior year with Blaine at McKinley, Kurt’s adventures at the graveyard continued. He just added a trip up to the Dalton graveyard every few months so he could finish exploring it. He realized during that time that he got the same feelings when talking to his mom while exploring the graveyard at Dalton as his did in the graveyard at Lima where she was buried. It didn’t matter where…Kurt figured it was probably more of connection to the action. As the year went on and things happened…the play and all that surrounded it, Scandals, the elections, Christmas, Michael Jackson week, the Chandler incident, NYADA applications and tryouts (How stupid he felt following Rachel’s advice), teen marriage tantrums, all of it... he found talking to his mother cheaper than therapy and less likely to get himself screamed at than calling a hotline of some sort.

He went a few times over the summer, when Blaine was busy doing other things. A few days before he left Lima, the day before he sold his SUV, he dug out some of the very first scavenger hunts his mom had created for him…the ones with pictures or dates to match, the ABC ones, the hunt lists that were formed from his list of very first words…and headed out for a full day. He even packed lunch. He visited and left flowers at gravestones he’d frequented over the years, leaving his mother’s stone for last. That evening he did sit and talk, like his dad had always done. He told her about his fears…not having any where to live, not being able to find work, not making any friends, Rachel bailing on him, being alone, having to return to Lima a failure. He spoke about dreams and places he wanted to see. He was there for well over two hours, just pouring out everything he wanted to say but couldn’t bring himself to do so to anyone else.

New York was as hard as Kurt feared, but he also did better than he expected. He found the loft through a connection of his dad. They could afford it because it was bare at the start and Rachel’s dads agreed to pay half of rent and utilities and food. He found a job he adored, which at the moment was a paid internship, at least until the start of the New Year. It wasn’t a well-paying internship, but it was enough to cover rent and utilities. He found another job as well. It was just down the street from their place and he only worked the breakfast hours and Sunday brunch. It wasn’t full time, but he made enough to cover food and a few pieces of clothing and furnishing some of the loft with very careful buying practices.

It left him stressed and he missed his dad and Carole and Finn…and the time he spent pouring his heart out to his mom. He missed all his friends back home. Rachel wasn’t bad, really, but things had to be Rachel’s way and she was good at guilt tripping you into doing what she wanted. Then the break-up happened. Yes, he’d promised a lot of people he’d go back to Lima for the play, even though he knew he was not ready to see or deal with Blaine. When it came down to it, though, the play wasn’t the main reason Kurt went home. Rachel may have thought so, Finn may have thought so, but the main reason Kurt went home was to talk to his mom. Rachel yelled at him after he’d spent the afternoon walking around the graveyard, visiting the familiar stones and telling his mother all about New York…and Blaine, and not being able to sleep and the constant worry about what he could have done different and why he wasn’t good enough...or even just enough. He told her about trying to get into NYADA and just not understanding why he was having no luck.

And even though he heard for the evening, until they went to the play, about how awful he was to abandon Rachel to the possibility of Finn coming to find her to talk to her, Kurt felt more grounded than he had in months.

Back in New York, Kurt put those ideas he’s considered while walking around the graveyard in Lima to work. He looked into better options for sleep aids than drugs, he asked about what his auditions had been missing, he made sure to attend the Vogue.com gatherings he was invited to and he focused on working. He even went out for drinks with co-workers a few times. 

But the grounding he’d found was drifting away as the trip to Lima was farther in the past and life in New York didn’t get less stressful.

He’d stayed in New York for Thanksgiving mainly to make Rachel happy, but also because his dad and Carole weren’t going to be at home anyway. He decided to stay for Christmas because he had no funds to go anywhere. Carole and Finn were going to visit Finn’s grandparents…his dad’s parents…anyway. 

And then December happened. Between the Santa screw-up, the Winter Showcase, Christmas with his dad and his not-so-welcome present Blaine, and his dad’s announcement, Kurt was popping antacids and sleeping pills and hoping that maybe he could find a free therapist soon. Not to mention he had no idea if he’d still be able to work at Vogue.com after the New Year at all and he didn’t really want to lose the friends he’d made there.

Chase ended up being a lifesaver in more than one way the day before the old year passed.

“Your internship time is up, but I have scored you a non-paying job as a go-to/ jack-of-all-trades nine hours a week. We made a deal to trade time for credit. You have to write a paper every week telling what you learned that week. The professor overseeing this is listed here and you will need to see them as soon as you start school to ask about the details.” Chase said, handing Kurt a slip of paper. “Are you all right, Kurt? You are not looking very well.”

“I’m stressed and I haven’t figured out how to rid myself of it yet.” Kurt said. “You heard about some of it, I’m sure.”

“I am sorry about the whole Santa thing, but I am glad you took Isabelle’s advice and reported it.” Chase said.

“I just feel so stupid.” Kurt said.

“So what do you usually do when you feel this way?” Chase asked.

Kurt looked at Chase and considered for a few. “Promise not to laugh?”

“I promise.”

“I used to go to the graveyard my mom is buried in and walk around looking at all the stones. When I was little, she used to take me out on graveyard scavenger hunts. Walking around like that makes me feel close to her. When she died, my dad would sit and talk to her, but I’d wander around. I did my talking then and didn’t disturb him. I just continued.”

Chase smiled. “I think that is rather sweet. Was it always just at that one graveyard?”

Kurt smiled. “No. When I was at a private school for a while, I wandered and talked at the little graveyard there.”

“New York has some very fascinating graveyards, Kurt.” Chase said, before heading back to work.

Kurt just all of a sudden lacked time, and he didn’t necessarily want to go alone to a new graveyard in a huge city like New York, so he didn’t even get back to the idea for nearly a month. It wasn’t a bad month, not really. Starting NYADA was a bit stressful, but considering how Rachel had been acting he hadn’t expected her to pay him any attention at all. Oh, he’d hoped for her to help him around and maybe introduce him to a few people, but he had not counted on it. And he did meet Adam, and his Apples, which was good even if Rachel thought he was ‘ruining’ his life and entire career and all chances at any future (and possibly even his chances at a job everywhere in the world including his dad’s shop in Lima and the chance of getting married and having kids someday…the rant she was tossing that shit round in was disjointed at best, those consequences could have been from daring to tell her no, he wasn’t going to wash her unmentionables by hand for her.) Rachel’s sheer horridness was however seriously making him a huge ball of anxiety and stress and he was getting ready to pop.

It came to a head the day before the Midnight Madness competition. Adam had whisked him off away from the loft after hearing Rachel scream nastiness at him when he went to take Kurt home from school after he nearly collapsed in a class, Kurt who’d been tossing-up everything he’d eaten all day and was jumping at every sound. Tucked away in Adam’s apartment, Adam tried to coax something into Kurt’s tummy.

“It’s not going to work.” Kurt said with a sigh, looking at the ginger ale and soda crackers.

“Do you know anything that will? You can’t keep going on like this, you’ll be in the ER before it is time for Midnight Madness and you will end up there constantly without that to change your roommate’s behavior. Is there something that you have done before that has helped when you were this bugged out?”

Kurt tossed himself against the couch, in a move that deserved points for dramatic flair. “You’ll laugh.”

“Do you really care at this point?” Adam asked.

Kurt shook his head. “When I lived at home, when I started getting this stressed feeling I’d go and wander the graveyard…and talk to my mom.”

Adam didn’t laugh. He instead made a thoughtful sound.

“Did you talk to her at her gravesite?” Adam asked softly.

“Not really. Even before she died, we’d go to graveyards together and explore. She made me games. She liked graveyards and she treated them like some sort of glorified park, even better because no one there was going to pick on me or beat on me.”

“So…it isn’t just a single graveyard this worked with, not just the graveyard your mother’s is buried in?” Adam asked.

“It worked at the graveyard at Dalton.”

“Try and eat four crackers and drink some of that ginger ale. I’m going to make a phone call.”

Kurt sighed and started to nibble on a cracker. At least Adam hadn’t laughed.

He had finished a cracker and managed three sips of ginger ale when Adam came out of the bedroom and tossed Kurt one of his sweat shirts.

“Put that on under your coat, with you not being able to keep anything down you’ll chill easily. We have to catch the subway in 10.”

Kurt pulled on the sweatshirt and let Adam drag him off.

Kurt followed along as Adam dragged him here and there, before noticing they were in front of a wrought iron gate that was open. “I called Julie to figure out our best bet. There are other places to bring you in the spring and summer that are, according to Julie even cooler, but she said this would be our best bet for right now.”

“Green-wood cemetery.” Kurt read.

“Now tell me how time with your mother worked.” Adam said, taking Kurt’s hand and leading him in through the gates.

Kurt smiled and leaned in to kiss Adam’s cheek. “When I was first learning my letters she’d say ‘Kurt, find the letter K.’ And I’d run from stone to stone till I found one, and then she’d read to me the name. Later we did dates and had scavenger hunts. We should do the alphabet game now, though…first or last names?”

“First.” Adam said.

“I don’t know if we’ll find all the letters, some might be covered with snow, but there do seem to be plenty of tall stones!” Kurt said, excitedly. “Adam, it is HUGE. We could look here for days!”

“Let’s limit ourselves to about two hours. It is too cold for days. Now, let’s hunt and you can tell me more about your mom while we look.”

Kurt pulled Adam along the paths as he told Adam of adventures with his mom…sing a-longs and movie marathons, picnics and tea parties and root beer floats, all the games they played which Kurt later realized were done to help him learn. Adam in turned shared his own stories of his family…including a grandmother who had been much like Kurt’s mom in her love of cemeteries.

A few hours later, after making it only to M because they kept getting distracted by each other and talking, Kurt and Adam returned to Adam’s apartment. They ate dinner, which Kurt was able to eat and keep down, and Kurt cuddled into Adam’s arms to spend the night.

“Anytime you need, Kurt, I’ll go with you. I didn’t find it a silly thing at all and I very much enjoyed the time with you. And I’ll give you Julie’s number. She like knows everything about pretty much every graveyard in New York…possibly the whole state of New York. She’s deep into preservation stuff.” Adam said softly as Kurt was drifting to sleep. 

Kurt fell asleep, with the sure knowledge that his mom approved of Adam.


End file.
